The best way and most cost effective way to use videos for your marketing efforts is by using the YouTube platform. As you may already know, YouTube isn’t just a hosting platform, but a search engine that makes it to be one of the best platforms to do marketing—video marketing.

To utilize the most out of what YouTube has to offer, you have to understand what makes YouTube favor videos over others and what you can do to get on its radar. This is called strategy.

YouTube, just like Google, looks at the keywords in its videos. If a person is looking for a video, Google will consider those that are titled close to what the user is looking for.

Keywords in the description helps as do the tags when the uploader publishes a video. If you have a transcript and upload that to the video, the keywords will be there, too.

YouTube doesn’t care so much about how many times people are watching your video, they are more concerned about keeping people on its platform. Your goal is to keep the viewer on YouTube as long as possible if you want Google to favor your content. This is called video watch time and channel minutes watched.

If you have a video that’s three minutes long and people stay for the whole thing, which is great—you got a 100% retention. But if someone has a 20 minute video and the same number of viewers watch for only 10 minutes—50% retention—that alone could have youtube favor it more than yours because the minutes watched is greater even though the video retention was less.

The sweet spot for a YouTube video is between 10-15 minutes. If your channel is monetized, you’ll also get a nice perk to include ads in the middle of your video.

Why Keep Viewers On YouTube’s Platform

Just like any business, YouTube wants viewers to stay because they have advertisers that pay them to promote their products or services. The longer you keep people on the platform, the more ads are shown, and the more YouTube is able to generate revenue.

YouTube does penalize you if people leave YouTube or even leave the tab during your session. Think of it like a game of hot potato. The viewers will eventually leave, but you can either see how much more of your content they will watch before they leave or you can pass the baton to another channel and help keep the viewer on YouTube. If they stick around after you defer the attention to another channel, you’ll get rewarded, but if they leave after the referral, the video they left will get penalized.

End Screen Elements

By adding end screen elements, you help people either continue to watch your content or to stay on the YouTube platform. You can either refer the viewer to watch a playlist, the last video published, or a recommended video by YouTube. You can also add a subscription button or a link to an approved website.

If you do recommend another video for the viewer, you can recommend a video that’s inside of a playlist so that when the viewer is done watching that video, the next video in the playlist will continue to keep them watching. This is under the assumption that the video is related to what they searched for originally.

 Cards 

Cards are great because it’s essentially self promotion throughout the video. The cards are the little callouts at the upper right of the screen with an “I” in the middle of a circle. By pressing this, you can see all of the promotional links throughout the video.

Transcription for Close Captioning

Transcriptions are often overlooked because you’ve already shot a video, edited it, published it, and now needing to promote it. Transcriptions take about three times the duration of the video to draft and ideally you would upload this to YouTube to put with your video.

By transcribing your videos, you remove the hard work from YouTube and now they know exactly what your video is about rather than relying on the title, description, and tags. Your videos will become more searchable by having this ready for YouTube.

Video Title

Your title should be anywhere between 5 and 10 words in length. Ideally you want something that other people are searching for so they come across your content naturally—this is called organic search.

Pro tip: Do keyword research ahead of time to know what people are looking for. By knowing what key phrases are getting high search volume, you can almost bank on your video getting views. Especially if it’s evergreen content or in other words information that doesn’t change at all or very often.

Video Description

The video description should also include some keywords or key phrases that people are searching for. This will tell Google and YouTube what the video is about and further support the keywords in the title.

 Tags

Video tags help youtube know how to categorize your videos and where to put it with the other millions of videos in its library. By adding proper tags, you can further your reach with key words or phrases. You only get 500 characters to include, so make them count. Tags also supports the video title and description

Pro Tip: You can revive a “dead” channel a lot faster than you can by starting a new channel. Just like how Google looks at the age of your domain as part of your domain authority, YouTube looks at your channel’s age as part of your channel authority. If your channel has been around longer and you begin to add content, your content will potentially rank a lot faster than putting new content on a brand new channel that hasn’t built any credibility.

YouTube will also take into account content that was posted within the last 100 days when determining upload frequency and watch time. Uploading consistently helps your viewers know when to expect your content. Uploading frequently triggers YouTube to put your channel on its radar provided your providing quality content for its viewers. After about 100 days of consistent, frequent, and engaging content, YouTube will intervene and begin to promote your content a lot more seeing that you’re a high-quality contributor to its platform.

Creating Other Content With Video Marketing

After you’ve created your video, now comes the time to promote your content. In an ideal world, you would have your transcription already made. If you take some extra time, you can refine to become a blog post for your site. Don’t worry if you already have something related to the topic of the video on your site. This is just more content for your viewers and you can couple this blog article with your video on your site to help keep people on your page longer.

When Google sees that people are search for something, then come to your page and watch a video, that time they stay on your site and page will signal to Google that the content is relevant. Videos are a powerful way to help boost your rankings on Google.

See if you can create some teaser content for Facebook and Linkedin to get people to watch your video on your site. That’s right—your site. If people are gonna leave other social media platforms, you might as well have them come to your site to watch your video on your blog post. The main goal is to have people come to your site and buy your product or service.

Rather than creating teaser content, you can create a condensed version to post on facebook or Linkedin to help further establish yourself as the authority in your niche.

Can you take a couple of one-liners from your video? Great! Now you have twitter content. Just a link to your site and you have something that people can click and share.

Take those same one-liners and put them against a relevant background image to come up with instagram and Pinterest posts. Be sure that when you use Pinterest, you add a link to your article with the video so your video gets views.

Conclusion

Do video keyword or keyphrase research before you create your video. The longer and more engaging your video is, the more likely Youtube is to reward your video by recommending it to more viewers. Use as much as Youtube’s platform features as you can like subtitles, end-screen elements, in-video cards, etc.

Add a detailed description and use tags properly so your video is more likely to get indexed by Google and also recommended on the Google search engine.

Repurpose as much as your video content that you can to promote on other social platforms and drive that traffic back to your video. Having quality social signals back to your video will help your video to get more exposure.